One summer can set a life's course

Janet Simons, Rocky Mountain News

Published February 19, 2007 at midnight

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Could a summer-camp experience influence career choices? We look at three adults who would adamantly agree that they very well could.

Script for the future

Alisa Frazzini, 25, of New York City, is a behind-the-scenes supporter of the performing arts who got a head start on her professional life at camp in Colorado. At ages 14 and 15, Frazzini took classes in the summer program of the Denver Center Theater Academy, which is tied to the Denver Center for the Performing Arts. She served as a teaching assistant there when she 16.

Her "ah-ha" moment came during the summer before her senior year at Wheat Ridge High School, when she was at the National High School Institute Theater Arts Program at Northwestern University, in Chicago.

"At Northwestern, I was with people who were completely focused on acting, and I realized that it isn't enough," she said.

She decided to focus her life on something broader than acting. She returned to Colorado to enroll at the University of Northern Colorado, where she graduated with double majors in theater and political science.

"I believe that policy and art directly affect each other and that it's important to understand how they merge," she said.

These days, she works for a nonprofit agency, Donors Choose, donorschoose.org. The organization raises money for cultural programs that teachers would like to implement but their districts can't afford.

"Art changes how individuals think," Frazzini said. "All young people need the opportunity to be involved in it."

Life lessons at camp

Tyler Weeks was 8 when Doc Palmere came to his third-grade class to talk about space travel. The visit changed his life.

He took home a brochure for one of the first sessions of Palmere's Space Voyage Academy summer camp and persuaded his parents to send him. Weeks returned as either a camper, an apprentice or an instructor each summer after that until he graduated from Columbine High School in 2003.

If Palmere hadn't come to his school, Weeks doubts he would be at the U.S. Air Force Academy today.

"I've always been interested in science, and I learned a lot from Space Voyage Academy. But the biggest thing I took out were the life lessons," he says.

Space Voyage campers slowly work their way through progressively more difficult levels of the program, explained Weeks, 22. Knowing that he could reach the top gave him confidence in his abilities as a leader.

"The idea of working your way up through the levels, then taking on tremendous leadership responsibilities, applies directly to what I do here at the academy," he says.

And space travel?

"It's not one of my big goals right now," he says. "But flight training interests me, and that's the first step toward being an astronaut."

A bankable experience

Nneka Bradford can trace her interest in the world of finance to age 7, when her parents took her to open a savings account at Young Americans Bank.

"The bank allows children to do a number of things that most people can't do until they're older," Bradford said. She started using a credit card with a $100 limit at age 12, paying it back with baby-sitting money.

Bradford, 26, says her involvement with the bank's Young AmeriTowne summer day camp helped set her on a path toward a career in finance. Through Young AmeriTowne, campers take roles in a miniature economy and run an imaginary town.

Bradford now works as a business analyst at Lehman Brothers in New York City.

"I began to see how the economy works and what drives profit," said the 1998 graduate of Aurora's Rangeview High School. "Young AmeriTowne gives kids a snapshot of what is required to make an economy run."

Bradford went to work for Lehman Brothers shortly after she graduated with a major in finance from Hampton University, in Hampton, Va.

"When an interest is sparked at a young age, there's just no telling how it will be advanced," she said.

simonsj@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-2547

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